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Amp Hours for Ride-On Floor Scrapers: The Secrets Revealed

Production rates in a ride-on floor scraper are important. We’ve written about that before. But rather than talking more about the philosophy of these rates, let’s take a closer look at the technical side of things.

What are Amp Hours?

An amp hour, if you’re not sure, refers to the amount of charge that can flow from a battery, given its charge and resistance. A Double A battery, for example, can realse on average 2-3 amp hours in its life. On the other hand, a car battery is capable of around 50 amp hours.

With these two points of reference, your average battery-powered ride-on floor scraper holds 300 amp hours. In theory, this power supply gives you plenty to work with all day.

A Terminator battery, to be specific, holds 400 amp hours. This is over 30% more battery life than those of our competitors. Keep these two statistics in mind: they’ll be important.

How Does Powering the Machine Actually Work?

If we think of amp hours as a pool of energy, powering the machine works by drawing on that pool over the course of a couple hours.

How fast you drain the pool (battery life) entirely depends on the size of the drain (power flow) specific to that scenario. In this instance, flow is regulated by the allowance of energy that can be pulled out at one time.

The Bottleneck Effect

A manufacturer can create an “all-day battery” by regulating the 300 amp hours supplied with most floor scrapers to only be fully drained over 8 hours of use. This averages 37.5 amp hours an hour.

A Terminator, supplying its 400 amp hours over 8 hours, however, averages 50 amp hours an hour at this same rate.

On the surface, a contractor believes he’s getting an “all-day battery”. What he can often fail to realize is that his battery is actually making the machine weaker than it has the ability to be.

The Key Difference

But the key standout difference between a Terminator and a competitor is that we don’t restrict you to 50 amp hours/hour over a work day. If you want, you can set your Terminator to full-power which can let you get up to 100 amp hours/hour of power.

We do this to try to remove the bottleneck effect as much as possible. It’s up to you to decide how much power you actually need when operating, and it’s senseless for us to restrict you in this capacity.

Why Amp Hours Really Matter

Say you want to tear up ceramic tile. Chances are, the quicker you work, the better for the sake of your customer.

If you want to break tile in a hurry, using a machine with higher amp hours and no bottleneck effect is going to allow that to happen faster.

The machine has more power being channelled through to it which allows it to plough through ceramics that much faster. This is going to save you both time and effort.

In the same way, if you wanted to use an extended 26” blade to pull up carpet or VCT flooring, you’re going to need a machine that has enough power to actually get through that material. A limited amp hour machine won’t produce enough power to be effective on these machines.

Conclusion

It’s important to know exactly how your machine is going to perform before you spend tens of thousands on it. Testing beforehand is always our recommendation, but sometimes that just isn’t an option.

Consider amp hours as a major selling point in your next purchase or rental. You might be surprised how spending a little more money on a better machine might actually save you more in the long run.